July 3rd, 2008
Here’s a fun promotional clip Motorola released a few years ago. It was designed to hype a then-brand-new cell phone, but I’m posting it here because it’s a smart encapsulation of more than a century of movies, stretching all the way from the pre-cinema zoetrope to LOST IN TRANSLATION — hey, there’s a Coppola connection there! — with flashes of Chaplin, Hitchcock, Saul Bass, METROPOLIS, CITIZEN KANE, James Bond, THE GRADUATE and a whole lot of other movies in between.
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July 3rd, 2008
Film geeks all over the world are salivating over the fact that missing scenes from Fritz Lang’s silent science fiction masterpiece METROPOLIS – scenes long thought lost forever — have apparently been found by ZEITmagazin (a German publication, in case you didn’t guess). Here’s an image of a a spy character named “Slim” suspiciously reading his copy of The Metropolis Courier.

You can read the whole story in the online (and English) version of ZEITmagazin here. No word on if and when this footage will be incorporated into a new release of the movie (obviously, there’s plenty of restoration work to be done), but it’s a pretty exciting discovery nonetheless. Now let’s find those missing reels from THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS!
Special thanks, by the way, for Movie Man pals Dan and Galen for bringing this to my attention!